Archaeology magazine picks top 10 discoveries of 2007

BEIJING, Dec. 20(Xinhuanet) -- Archaeology magazine, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, has selected the 10 most important archaeological discoveries in 2007, published in its January/February 2008 issue.

Travelers have noticed the 13 stone towers rising over Peru's coastal desert since at least the nineteenth century. But researchers only last year discovered the structures' purpose: they make up a sophisticated solar observatory, one of the earliest known in the Americas.

Last June, Austrian Assyriologist Michael Jursa was doing what he has done since 1991, poring over the more than 100,000 undeciphered cuneiform tablets in the British Museum. But while analyzing records from the Babylonian city of Sippar, he made a startling discovery with Biblical implications. It came in the unlikely form of a tablet noting a one-and-a-half pound gold donation to a temple made by an official, or "chief eunuch," Nebo-Sarsekim.